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August 10, 2011, 12:01 AM
For Better Grades, Try Gym Class
By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS
Christopher Futcher
If you want a young person to focus intently in school and perform
well on tests, should you first send him or her to gym class? That
question, which has particular relevance for school districts weighing
whether to reduce or ax their physical education programs to save
money, motivated a number of stimulating new examinations into the
interplay of activity and attention. Some of the experiments studied
children; others looked at laboratory rats bred to have an animal
version of attention deficit disorder. For both groups, exercise
significantly affected their ability to concentrate, although some
activities seemed to be better than others at sharpening attention.
The most striking of the new studies involved 138 schoolchildren ages
8 to 11 who were living in Rome. The children were physically healthy,
and none suffered from serious attention deficits. But like most
children that age, they found it difficult to remain fully engaged in
their lessons as the school day wore on. As the study’s authors, all
affiliated with the Foro Italico campus of the University of Rome,
point out, children “who undergo prolonged periods of academic
instruction often reduce their attention and concentration.”
To determine whether exertion could make students less distracted,
the researchers, whose study was published last week in Medicine &
Science in Sports & Exercise, had the children complete several types
of gym classes, as well as a typical instructional or lecture class. Just
before and immediately after the classes, the children took a written
test that required them to pick out certain letters from long chains of
symbols in a short time. The test is widely accepted as a good
indicator of a person’s attention and ability to concentrate.
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The children’s test scores rose after each of the classes. But by a wide
margin, their scores increased the most after a 50-minute gym class
that concentrated on endurance exercise. In that session, the young
students ran, walked, skipped and otherwise kept moving for the
duration of the class. Afterward, according to their test scores, they
were much better able to focus.
Interestingly, the children did not improve as much after a 50-minute
gym class that required them to learn new drills with a ball. That
session, which was “geared toward the development of both motor
control and perceptual-motor adaptation abilities,” required more
thought than the endurance class, the researchers wrote. Afterward,
their scores on attention tests rose, but not by as much. The
researchers speculated that asking the students to both think and
move was too much, inducing “an excessive stress load” on their
brains.
These findings resonate intriguingly with those of other newly
published experiments involving lab rats bred to have the symptoms
of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. These rats are twitchier
and even less capable of settling down than typical rodents. They also
can’t seem to stop investigating meaningless stimuli. When
researchers shine a light into these rats’ cages, the animals keep going
to the glow, long after they should have learned that the light was
unimportant.
But researchers at the department of psychological and brain sciences
at Dartmouth University found that giving adolescent rats access to a
running wheel for three weeks before starting to shine the light in
their cages significantly altered how the young animals responded.
The exercised rats noticed the light, investigated it a few times and
then moved on. Running had enabled the attention-deprived rats to
better focus on what was meaningful — or not — in their cages.
The full effect of exercise on attention, though, remains tangled.
During a separate part of the experiment that presented the
A.D.H.D.-afflicted rats with a learning challenge, the animals that had
exercised were no better than sedentary rodents at figuring out that a
different light cue meant food. Exercise did not seem to boost their
intellect, just as the Italian schoolchildren didn’t focus as well if their
gym class added mental tasks to the physical exertion. “There is still a
great deal that we need to learn about which parts of the brain
preferentially are affected by exercise” in animals or people with
attention deficits, said Andrea Robinson, a doctoral student at
Dartmouth who conducted the rat experiments.
Still, she continued, the current findings are encouraging. “The
implication is that exercise might in fact help to treat” young people
with A.D.H.D. and, more broadly, enable all children to better absorb
lessons in geometry or geology. “If I had to extrapolate” to children
from her group’s findings in rats, Ms. Robinson said, the lesson would
be, “let kids run around” during the school day and don’t require
them constantly either to sit or to think. Or, to be more blunt, it may
be time to start looking at gym classes not as lost academic hours but
as a means to scholastic enrichment.